 My
daughter has got into the reading habit thanks to Gobar Times,
especially on issues related to science. She eagerly awaits for every issue of the
magazine. The GT centrespread "Know your Watts" (October 15 issue) was
really educative for children. Such articles revive what they have studied in school and
tell them how to use the knowledge in a practical sense.
With regards,
K.J. Anandha kumar
New Delhi I am a student of Class V
and one day we were taught waste management in the classroom. So now we practice this at
home. We have five bags. One for plastics, another for cardboard and paper, one for
foodscraps, one for glass and the last for old clothes.
Devki Khosla
New Delhi
In
Rajasthan a lot of marble and limestone mining takes place. It involves huge
amounts of cutting, washing and drilling. This badly affected the environment and the land
became bare and barren. All this while, the mine owners became very wealthy.
But a few years ago, the government asked the mining companies to clean
up their act and find a solution to the problems they had created or action would be taken
against them.
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Imagine how it feels,
If people eat you for their meals,
If they kill you, pull out your hair,
As if they just don’t care,
We put them in cages to see,
Thinking "they" suffer, "not me",
We tame them and hit them,
If they don’t do well,
And kill them for their skin
that we have to sell,
It is not fair for them to die out,
We are so selfish that,
we don’t even see them pout.
Kanupriya Rungta
and Gitana Singh
Shri Ram School, New Delhi |
So the mine owners came up with the idea of planting more trees
in the area and recycling the gallons and gallons of water they used to clean and treat
the marble.
Bus drivers were given an incentive for planting tress and they had to
plant at least 30 trees at various places.
Today the area has become richer in water and greenery. We have
witnessed this process.
India has many mines that exploit the land to a very large extent. We
feel that many companies can learn lessons from the above example.
Nicola Lungalang and Kanika Mathur
10th Grade, Woodstock School
Mussorie
In February this year in "Put your message in
a bottle", we had asked you whether you were angry about the plastic invasion of our
nation. We had asked you to put your messages in a plastic bottle, crush it and send it to
us.
Message
from-a-bottle
In response, Gobar Times reader
Philippa Russell collected two bottles full of messages from villages in Kangra, Himachal
Pradesh. According to her, Himachal is facing a major environmental threat from plastic
and the ban on plastic bags has had no impact in the state.
All the villagers lambasted the use of plastic and called for its ban.
"Dangerous disease", "environmental curse" and "Main cause of
pollution" were some of the comments that they wrote down.
One said the government was doing its bit to bring the plastic menace
under control and no village was guilty of it, so this was clearly a problem created by
"city folk".
Another asked for the banning of plastic pouches filled with alcohol, a
common sight in rural India. (She had no problem with the alcohol, they could be sold in
glass bottles for all she cared!).
Some pointed out that plastic was degrading the fields and clogging
drains of the villages.
One villager called for the burning of all plastic bags! Now that's
definitely not a good idea because the burning of plastic leads to toxic smoke, which has
dioxins, which are a major health hazard. There was also a philosophical comment that said
"Plastic is an experiment with life".
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